Tuesday, 14 September 2010

Review - Urban Decay Black palette

Disclosure - PR sample

Urban Decay are really spoiling us with palettes lately. There's the new Book of Shadows, the Naked palette, the Black Palette and the new Vegan Palette (in which every shade is free of animal extracts), all releases hot on one another's heels ready for the Christmas shopping season.

The Black Palette (maybe a reference to Metallica's The Black Album?) is something that I probably would have moved heaven and earth to get hold of in my younger and more rock-obsessed years, and even today it's ticking quite a lot of boxes for me. The packaging is superb. It's a glittering black pocket-sized cardboard enclosure with a mirror in the lid and a glossy silver "UD" design in gothic script on the top. It's slightly larger than the Preen/Showpony palette, but still very compact.

Six shadows, each a MAC-sized circular pan, are inside, along with the ubiquitous Zero 24/7 mini eyeliner. (If you're a UD palette collector like me you'll have at least 6 of these by now.) Each colour has a rawk-tastic title, and each is predominantly black. Five of the shades have a shift of colour, and Black Dog is a straight matte black. Each one is velvety-smooth and heaping with pigmenty goodness. Because this is clearly a night-out type of palette, I decided to photograph and swatch these under artificial light to show them off in their natural habitat.

Look at them glow!

Eagle-eyed readers will also have spotted that we get a miniature Urban Decay Primer Potion in new shade Eden. This is the UK's first exposure to Eden, which like Sin before it is a coloured variant of the standard UDPP formula. Eden is a matte nude shade, and is great for evening out skintone on the eyelids. However the downside of this is that, like a concealer, it has its own shade and it won't necessarily match everyone's skintone. The swatches above are done over a layer of Eden, and you might be able to see that it leaves a slight orange tidemark where it mismatches my arm. Here's Eden (lower swatch) and the original UDPP together so you can see the difference.

The Urban Decay Black palette is a very reasonable £23 and is available now. I'd buy from Boots because of the Advantage Card points.